On the Bus

by Mark Fischweicher

Jeans so tight I would worry about ripping them just getting them on,
but they were ripped already.

With sky blue hair, long and full of manufactured curls
that matched the jeans.

She reminded me of the woman on the train yesterday, Easter Sunday,
obviously riding back from the parade.
Quite a bonnet!
The closest we can come to looking like
the cherry blossoms in the park,
covered with petals and rainbow colored satin eggs
she looked like she could easily tip over
and no one batted even an eye
on the IRT
reminding me again of ‘Blue’
on her way to work on Monday morning

Later, I walked through the little park on Second Avenue
only two blocks wide with a fountain in the middle,
not turned on yet but surrounded with tulips in full bloom
as colorful as any hat in the parade

Where a nurse or aide helped an old man with a walker
to the edge of the circle to get an even better view.
Tulips have so many colors
“So beautiful,” I said and she agreed,
“So blue.”

 

 

Mark Fischweicher has been scratching out poems since junior high school and still hopes it may become a regular thing.

 

Request to a Glass-Winged Butterfly

by Carmen Mason

Might you fly as slowly
as you can
so I may take in everything
through your pellucid wings?

It would be less
overwhelming then
and of course, amazing
peering through you like that.

And could you on another day
let me use you as a parasail
and ride you and pretend
I too may be seen clear through

Not found wanting or obtuse
just what I am, what I am,
~ clear through?

 

Carmen Mason has always written poetry and prose as meditation and to make some sense of things. They are a way to duel and dance with love and fear, joy and discovery.

 

 

Lattice

by Carmen Mason

I have been a lattice
all my life
but now the winds have ceased
the roses’ merciless thorns
all fallen,   nailing dry
rose petals beneath me
into hard ground

I beg to let me fall with them
not outlive the one
who fashioned me
whose propping and prolonging
with new wood, paint and nails
seem like a crucifixual
stand for beauty ~

it matters nothing now
my bracing of
this grave world:
He is not coming
He will never come

 

Carmen Mason has always written poetry and prose as meditation and to make some sense of things. They are a way to duel and dance with love and fear, joy and discovery.

First Snow

by Carmen Mason

There’s a slight scent of first
snow coming through the woods
behind my house where years ago
I walked right after moving there
and found streams of celluloid
from the closed up movie house
tangled in the ragged brush
knotted round the rigid trunks and
holding some up to the icy sun I saw
frame after frame of naked women, men
little children wretched,   posed
smeared now
with leaves and mud

days later I returned to find
glistening sheets of snow untouched
but for the V’s of tiny birds
frozen amorphous drifts bedazzling
some encircling the bases of the trees
cloaking all that lay beneath
as if these shrouds and
firm white collars of frost might
benumb and petrify, then turn
the world back to itself
when it was new

 

 

Carmen Mason has always written poetry and prose as meditation and to make some sense of things. They are a way to duel and dance with love and fear, joy and discovery.

Southern Fried College Football

by Tom Ashley

Alabama’s highest paid employee headed to
billionaire status who happens to be making
considerably, by a factor of 24, more
damn dough, is the football coach not the governor,
expected to win a national championship ‘cuz
failure is not an option in Tuscaloosa where
gridiron greatness is demanded and to
hell with any talk of classroom participation
injurious to the mighty ‘Crimson Tide’ boys
kicking the stuffing and giving a good ‘ole
lickin’ to some other knuckleheaded young
men all soon to be dispatched to a completely
nothing job with a concussion or four plus
operations on both knees and a shoulder not
properly thinking about a future or
questioning what they accomplished while a
resident for four years of sweat blood and
simply a handful of credits and injuries
taking them from job to job no relief in sight
unless they hit the Alabama state lottery and
very few people have had such good fortune
winning these but go right ahead putting
xs down on those lotto cards all the while
you’re going through want ads from a to
z and coming up with nothing.

 

Taking many study groups over the years at the IRP has been a growing and stimulating process.  In college, I dreaded my writing courses.  I LOVE them now.

Learning My A, B, Cs

by Tom Ashley

As I was saying to the nasty
Bad girl in the third row on the left
Curling her long golden locks and
Disturbing all the excitable young men
Enough is enough don’t you think you tart
For christ’s sake I’m trying, god knows, to teach
Goddamn poetry to you hopeless and shallow
Hedonistic moronic ‘students’ of
Idiotic, impossibly dull imagination combing a
Jaded outlook debating which flavor
Krispy Kreme donut you’ll avail yourself then
Lovingly slam down your throat while swallowing
Mouthing to the server that absolutely RIEN
Nothing NIENTE is going to prevent yet another
Order of those crullers accompanied by a
Pumpkin latte with whipped cream and in
Quest of the perfect meal please add the
Rib sandwich and additional
Sweet thick maple sauce and those super
Toffee coated twice baked potatoes
Unless maybe you should get two in case you’re
Very hungry and not able to get close or
Within another Krispy Kreme like one near
Xerox’s headquarters on the corner of
Yerba Linda and Ashley, next to House of
Zen

 

 

Taking many study groups over the years at the IRP has been a growing and stimulating process.  In college, I dreaded my writing courses.  I LOVE them now.

Persona

by Harriet Sohmers Zwerling

“She comes on drenched in perfume called

            Self-Satisfaction from feather boa to silver pumps.

Edward Field, Mae West

Her hair glows like the moon and her fiery lips have a cruel
turn that says I conquer!

She loves herself and expects you to …
While you are looking fearfully
in the bathroom mirror,
slathering your cheeks with cream,
plucking doubtfully at your eyebrows,
seeking a fuller shape for your lips,
she is queening it on the screen with men—
Cary Grant groveling in admiration before her
bountiful breasts and full white arms.

Truth is; you don’t have to be a beauty to rule!
You do have to burn with
sensual fever. You do have to empty your mind
of banality. You do have to be daring
and free of those antique prohibitions.
that kept us humble  You do have to imagine yourself
as the proud, conquering female of your tribe,
and never refuse an adventure.

 
Harriet Sohmers Zwerling: Ex-expatriate, ex-nude model, ex-school teacher. Forever hedonist, grandmother and of course, writer.

Bayscape

by Harriet Sohmers Zwerling

At first glance it is all one blue,
but nearer, you see the
indigo above, the teal below.
A pale ocher line divides them
into two unequal parts,
sky above, bay below,
the town wharf between.
Light from somewhere paints
the facades of the boat house,
the cold storage, the office.
And lined up along the pier
are the tiny fishing boats,
like wispy mosquitoes.

Judging from the darkness, a storm is coming.
That thick sky will soon glimmer with
lightning; the almost emerald water
leap with raindrops and
the pier disappear into the fog.

And I will be back at Beach Point
with you, love…

Harriet Sohmers Zwerling: Ex-expatriate, ex-nude model, ex-school teacher. Forever hedonist, grandmother and of course, writer.

To Barbara Tuchman

by Lucy Wollin

Despite you, we are
Refugees from history,
Lost
And out there in the stars
Spacemen adjust a bolt
And come back, wanting to
Ignore the news.

The Khmer Rouge threw doctors headless into pits
We do not hear the cries from the boneyards
Blind as a veteran’s thousand-meter stare
John Wayne is marching into El Salvador
Children are dragged from their parents screaming

We belly our ambushes into jungles
Men and women hide behind the giant ferns
Lobbing curses
Yankee so’jer you die tonight
And take our guns from us
And hang our ears from their belts
And paint their faces green

And so’jer you die
 
Despite fields of fire
Agent orange
Rumors of war
We are lost
And they are lost, too.

 
Lucy Wollin has been writing poetry on and off since she was able to write. Attending the Bread Loaf English School and Writers’ Conference helped her to focus and taking Sarah White’s IRP classes was a source of ideas as well.

Sweet Five

by Sarah White

Five o’clock
on a winter morning.
Half asleep
alone.

Five-year-old
Owen
at the door.

Bad dream,
Mom.
 
I mumble—
Crawl in …
It’s warm.

At dawn
he wakes,
stretches,
looks around,
remembers.
This
 is really living,
he exclaims.

 
Sarah White: Author of Cleopatra Haunts the Hudson (Spuyten Duyvil, 2007) and Alice Ages and Ages (BlazeVox, 2010), she is working on a collection of linked poems inspired by Dante’s Purgatorio.